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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Hopefully my last post on "theft by deception"

By the time actual practice started yesterday I had become more and more convinced that we had seen Matthews, Deloach, Taylor and LeMay in silver britches for the last time. For me, admittedly well outside the arena, I kept coming back to the fact that the very institution that was housing, feeding and educating these young men had been the victim. The University of Georgia was the one deceived and stolen from when those checks were cashed a second time.

You bite the hand that feeds you and you're are very likely to go hungry until you find another way to the table.

But, what neither I nor you are privy to is how these young men reacted to getting caught. And as Coach Richt suggested to the media yesterday, dismissal is still on the table as a possible consequence. However, if there is one thing I am sure of, it's that if they had not been completely forthright and if Richt was not satisfied with their level of contriteness, they would not have been on the practice field yesterday. You take a man that has given you an opportunity so few are afforded, only to put that man (and his superiors) in the position of having to embarrass the school or risk committing a serious breach in NCAA compliance, and you have given him the opportunity to show you the road back home.

No one would have faulted Richt for doing just that. And again, he still may. But for now these four men are still a part of the team.

And while I honestly am not yet sure how that sits with me as a proud alumni, I am glad for Coach Richt to be able to make this kind of statement:

You’re disappointed, obviously. You’re disappointed. You have to decide, start deciding what you’re going to do about it. At Georgia, we’ve never tried to hide things. If somebody makes a mistake, we clean it up. We don’t hide it. In due time, everyone’s going to know what’s going to happen because of it. Some things when it comes to discipline are very public and some things aren’t. I’m not sure exactly where this is going to fall. If there’s something that we need to let everybody know, we’ll let y’all know."

Bernie's Dawg Blawg is not affiliated with the University of Georgia or any other institution or organization. It's use is meant solely for your utter boredom as well as a complement to your working knowledge of all things DAWG.